


Tiebreaker

by earlgreytea68



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: post - episode, post - the sign of three
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-07
Updated: 2014-01-07
Packaged: 2018-01-07 19:40:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,542
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1123635
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/earlgreytea68/pseuds/earlgreytea68
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John Watson is always aware of where Sherlock Holmes is. Sherlock shouldn't have stopped for his coat on his way out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tiebreaker

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to arctacuda for the quick beta and emmyangua for the equally quick Britpick.
> 
> So, I said to a friend, I don't even know how to fix The Sign of Three because IT IS THE SADDEST THING EVER WRITTEN. So then I tried to fix it. But I think I just broke it more? Sorry, guys.
> 
> Translated into Chinese here: http://221dnet.211.30i.cn/bbs/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=4935&extra=page%3D1

John always knows where Sherlock is in a room. He’d thought it was habit: making sure Sherlock stayed out of trouble during that period of time when keeping Sherlock out of trouble was his job description. He thinks now that it is more deeply ingrained in him than that, some sort of instinct in him that seeks Sherlock out, connects them through some fine thread even when there is space between them. He cannot shake the part of his brain that is always conscious of Sherlock, and he’s not sure anymore that he wants to. 

He probably shouldn’t have known the instant Sherlock left the room, because he should have been busy dancing with his new and newly pregnant wife, and in fact he was. But Sherlock left the room, slipped out, and John _knew_ , unerringly. John looked over his shoulder, craning for a glimpse of Sherlock, but he was neither in the middle of the action nor skulking along on the sidelines. John turned under the pretense of performing a particularly ridiculous twirl that Sherlock had tried to teach him one day and he had never perfected and finally Sherlock had stomped around the sitting room calling him an idiot who had never learned left from right or how to count to three properly. 

“John,” Mary protested, laughing, as he did his typically poor execution of the twirl, but John was looking up and beyond her. 

And he caught Molly glancing back at him and then quickly looking away. 

Molly. Who had seen Sherlock, in those last dark hours, so much more clearly than John had. Who had never believed that Sherlock had turned into some cold machine, and who had always believed good things of Sherlock. Molly, who had noticed that Sherlock was sad before John had. Molly, the only person John knew who could be credited with paying the same level of attention to Sherlock that John strove for. 

“I’ll be back,” John said, vaguely, to Mary, and just as vaguely kissed her, and just as vaguely heard her asking where he was going, but he was quickly weaving through the crowd, because Sherlock would be moving fast and had a head start. 

John, peering out a window as he hurried down the hall, caught a glimpse of Sherlock pulling on his coat with a dramatic twirl. Naturally he would have stopped for his coat. _July_ , and Sherlock had brought his coat along with him and was _wearing_ it. Because Sherlock’s coat was his armor, and all day today he’d been stripped bare because John had asked him to be, and guilt made John’s chest throb tightly and had him practically hurtling through the door in pursuit. 

“Hey!” he called. 

Sherlock hesitated the briefest of seconds, and John knew he was contemplating whether he could pretend he hadn’t heard. John jogged along the path, catching up, and Sherlock, with a sigh of resignation, turned to face him, hands tucked deep in his pockets. He looked wary, like John had thrown so much at him recently that he had no idea what might come next. And he also looked exhausted. And normally it took days and days without sleep for Sherlock Holmes to get exhausted and even then he never _looked_ it, just got paradoxically brighter and more frenzied, like a patient on a fever-high, until John wrestled him into bed. 

“You’re slipping out,” John accused, but he kept his voice light, good-natured. 

“No, I’m not,” Sherlock denied, automatically. 

Mary said John was terrible at knowing when Sherlock was lying to him, but that one had been fairly obvious so he just lifted his eyebrows. 

“Cigarette,” said Sherlock. 

“Really?” said John, because he knew that wasn’t true. 

“Yes. I…” Sherlock patted down his coat, his entire body, before straightening and saying, casually, “Yes, a cigarette.”

“You don’t even _have_ a cigarette,” John pointed out, amused. 

“I was going to find one,” Sherlock sniffed. 

“Where?”

There was a pause, and then Sherlock said, “Probably in London.”

“Slipping out,” John reiterated. 

“Well, you leave me no choice. They probably don’t even _sell_ cigarettes in this dowdy little village.”

“You should stay,” John said. 

Sherlock glanced toward the party in full swing behind John. “Not really my area,” he said. 

“You’ve a room here. You could go hide there. I’ll bring us whiskey.”

Sherlock grimaced. “No. Never again. Anyway, it’s your party. You’ll be missed.”

“You think you won’t be?” asked John. 

Sherlock looked at him for a long moment. His chest rose and fell with a breath. He said, “I need a cigarette. I can’t believe I didn’t bring any with me.”

John said, “Thank you for today.” Because he felt like he should. 

Sherlock drew his coat a little tighter around him and said, “I know the speech was too long, and I didn’t _plan_ for there to be a murder—”

“Sherlock, it was perfect. Every single thing about today was perfect.”

“Was it?” said Sherlock, and he sounded almost sad about that. 

Which bewildered John, because Sherlock had put a lot of effort into wanting the wedding to be perfect. “Yes,” John assured hm. “Come inside and dance. You love dancing.”

“No, I don’t,” said Sherlock. 

John gave him a look. 

Sherlock said, “I…Mycroft was…I think he said that…I mean, he rang earlier—that’s who I was on the phone with earlier—and he said that there was a thing, so.”

“A thing,” repeated John. 

“A thing,” said Sherlock, and refused to elaborate any further because only lies have detail. 

John looked at him and thought of saying good-bye, of letting him flee, of going back into the party with the woman who loved him, where it was warm with people he liked and loved, and meanwhile Sherlock would be alone in the dark on his way to London without even a cigarette to comfort him. And the problem was that John had no idea which was more important to him. Surely Sherlock was the second most important person in his life, except for the fact that John was certain he was actually the _most_ important. John Watson had a tie atop his most important person podium, and he had no idea what to do to resolve it. What could the tiebreaker possibly be? Was he doomed to spend the rest of his life feeling like he was cheating on one or the other of them with every decision he made? And there was a baby inside now, upsetting the delicate balance he’d been handling for several months. A baby that, quite possibly, had acted the role of tiebreaker, and here was Sherlock, stepping off the podium, relinquishing his claim. 

John stepped forward and hugged Sherlock, because he suddenly didn’t want to let him go. He hadn’t asked for the tiebreaker and he hadn’t been ready for it. And they had never been huggers but he hadn’t hugged Sherlock for his speech the way he’d really wanted to, and he let himself hug him that way now, arms around Sherlock firmly, face pressed into Sherlock’s shoulder. It was not the way you hugged your best friend, not entirely, but it was the way John thought you hugged the most important person in your life when you hadn’t made up your mind yet who had won there. 

Sherlock staggered backward, as if startled by the force of John’s embrace, and then suddenly lifted his arms up and crushed John against him. John uttered a little _oof_ , surprised out of him because Sherlock had not hugged back before and John hadn’t been expecting him to. But Sherlock held John so tightly that John could barely breathe. Sherlock put his head down, and his hair tickled John’s ear and his nose brushed against John’s neck and Sherlock breathed in, long and deep, and John wondered how many things he was deducing, if he was locking everything about this into his mind palace. John stayed very still, not daring to do anything that might make Sherlock draw any sort of conclusion about this, because John didn’t want a conclusion drawn, John wanted to keep floating in the world Sherlock and Mary had given him where he didn’t have to make a choice, didn’t have to find a tiebreaker, didn’t have to define what he was doing and how he felt because it was all okay and you didn’t need to put labels on things that were just _okay_. 

“Have a good holiday, John,” Sherlock said, after a moment, his voice rumbling through Sherlock’s chest and so through John against him. 

“Yeah,” John agreed, voice muffled into Sherlock’s coat. 

And when Sherlock let him go and walked away, John suddenly realized that Sherlock had been right and the July night was terribly cold. 

***

Sherlock got back to Baker Street and didn’t even stop to buy the cigarettes he’d been telling himself he was dying for. Because he didn’t want a cigarette. He wanted to crawl into his bed and sleep for a thousand years. 

And when he woke up, he thought, whenever he woke up, it was going to be morning. 

Turn the page, thought Sherlock, glancing up the stairs to John’s bedroom and then resolutely going into his own. 

New chapter.


End file.
